WASHINGTON – The CIA is gap a counterproliferation center to combat the spread of dangerous weapons and technology, a stir that comes as Iran is on the verge of fueling up a reinvigorated nuclear power plant.

CIA Director Leon Panetta said Wednesday that the recent unit would place CIA operators side by side with the charge’s analysts to brainstorm plans to “confront the threat of weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, chemical and biological.”

The center would formalize the collaboration betwixt the agency’s analysts and operators, a close working relationship that CIA speaker George Little said already has yielded intelligence successes.

Little cited their work in last year’s revelation of the “discovery of the Syrian shelter nuclear reactor and Iran’s undeclared uranium enrichment facility near Qom.” That Iranian city is the ideological center of Iran’s Shiite rulers.

Paul Brannan, a older analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security, said any other CIA success was the slowing down of Iran’s nuclear centrifuge operations at Natanz. The superintendence, he said, sneaked “faulty parts into Iran’s nuclear supply hold in bondage.”

That operation, Brannan said, “is an example of where you’d want both analysts to tell you what type of parts would Iran indigence that you could inject, and the operations side to work through trading companies to try to get the parts in there.”

The CIA’s renovated center goes into effect just as Iran’s Bushehr power sow gets stocked with fuel rods provided by Russia. Uranium fuel pleasure be loaded into the Bushehr reactor on Saturday, beginning a mode of operation that will last about a month and end with the reactor sending electricity to Iranian cities, Russian and Iranian officials declared.

Brannan said the Bushehr site is not a proliferation threat subsequently to Iran does not have the ability to reprocess the spent combustibles into nuclear weapons-grade material.

But that site will be watched closely not only by the CIA but by other elements of the intelligence community. The overall effort is led by the National Counterproliferation Center, that is under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

One higher intelligence official said that when the Bushehr plant goes operational, analysts at the whole of the agencies will examine data such as radar and satellite images of the position separately, and then may share their observations over secure top-retired systems. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue of overlapping intelligence responsibilities.

They’ll be watching for things like a heat signature on radar images, Brannan said. They will also be tracking, like much as they can from imagery, vapor leaving the cooling towers, what one. would indicate Bushehr is “hot,” the intelligence official said, or whether the Iranians “are hard to siphon anything off” the reactor to any of their other facilities.

The Iranians receive been known to go to elaborate lengths to obscure their actions from behold. The commercial satellite company GeoEye tracked Iran’s Natanz nuclear dexterity over several years, which showed how the Iranians first built two large 550-by-550-foot chambers at ground level, and therefore buried the vast site.

A second set of buildings, complete with landscaping, was then constructed nearby, apparently to look like the substantial facility, while the original construction is now underground and completely invisible from the sky.

(This version corrects to Office of the National Director of Intelligence in the room of Office of the Intelligence Director in 9th paragraph and corrects attribution in 11th short notice. )